The Lucky Ones
by Sakura Katana
Summary: Annie/Abed High School AU. Annie Edison doesn't notice Abed Nadir until February of their senior year, when Mr. Peterson gets left by his wife. Oneshot, probably.


Annie Edison doesn't notice Abed Nadir until February of their senior year, when Mr. Peterson gets left by his wife. Annie had always thought that Mr. Peterson was a pretty reasonable teacher. After all, shemanaged to get an A in his American Government class first semester, how bad could he be? Then he comes to school one Wednesday with his tie and his shirt not matching, and tells everyone today's class will be a quiet study hall and let's see if they could all shut up for more than two minutes at a time. He curses fairly fluently at them under his breath. Everyone hears it and isn't sure if they were supposed to.

The class is fairly shocked by this unprecedented behavior. Even Annie's gorgeous, quarter back, future husband Troy Barnes is surprised enough to stop showing off his paper football skills and pretend to read the textbook glossary. Annie decides to re-color code her already well-organized notes with the help of her increasingly clingy best friend Adderall, with occasional breaks to admire Troy's head shape. The class is uneasily quiet for about twenty minutes. Until someone drops a pen.

The sound of the pen hitting the linoleum isn't loud, but it makes Annie flinch. Mr. Peterson looks up from the sports car magazine he was staring at. "Whose pen was that?"

Nobody says anything. Mr. Peterson stares down the class for a moment, then returns to the development of his midlife crisis. Annie notices that the boy behind her is quietly leaning down to pick up a purple pen off the floor.

Mr. Peterson's head snaps up. "Aha! You!"

The boy sits up and looks at the teacher with large, round eyes. _Like Bambi_, Annie thinks. Except weirder and really tall and skinny. And a person.

"What do you have to say for yourself, Mr.…" Mr. Peterson checks his attendance list for something Middle Eastern-ish. "Abed Nadir?"

Abed blinks. "I dropped my pen."

Now that Annie's looking at it, his pen looks remarkably like one of her pens that she thought she lost a while ago.

"Does that qualify as a _quiet_ action to you, Mr. Nadir?"

Abed looks… blank, actually. He looks totally unaffected. Totally unlike Annie would feel or act under the circumstances.

Suddenly, something about Abed shifts. He stands up and slams his hands down on the desk. The class stares at him in unveiled surprise. "You can't win. You know that, don't you?" Abed says, his voice raised and different from when he spoke before. "It doesn't matter if you whip us, you'll still be where you were before, at the bottom. And we'll still be the lucky ones at the top with all the breaks."

At this point, some muffled cheers are heard in the class. Annie is still kind of in shock and not sure if this retaliation is deserved, but even she can barely restrain herself from clapping for this weirdo.

Abed continues, "It doesn't matter. Greasers will still be Greasers and Socs will still be Socs. It doesn't matter."

The now largely confused class falls silent. Abed looks the speechless Mr. Peterson in the eye, then sits down, his face once again perfectly blank.

The silence continues uncomfortably until one of the boys in the second row says, "Isn't that from a movie?"

This snaps Mr. Peterson out of it. He grabs a hall pass and scribbles on it. "My desk, _now_."

Abed gets up and walks to the teacher's desk. Annie thinks that he looks almost robotic – no, more like a bug. A stick bug or a praying mantis or something. She notices that he has nice hair, and isn't dressed like a freak despite clearly being one. She notices how small his calves are and feels an embarrassing twinge of jealousy. Adderall be great for her grades, but it's not doing her figure any favors. She wonders if Abed has sat behind her the whole year and she never noticed because she was paying so much attention to Troy.

Mr. Peterson slaps the hall pass into Abed's hand. "The principal's office, _now._"

"Wait, Mr. Peterson!" somebody shouts. Oh, it's her. And she's standing up now. "I think you should let me go with him. Abed – he doesn't do well with remembering directions." She drops her voice to a stage whisper. "_It's something to do with his_…" She points obviously to her head.

"Fine," Mr. Peterson says. "Go make sure he doesn't get lost and harass some other tenured professional."

Annie and Abed don't speak until they're halfway to the principal's office, when Abed pulls something out of his pocket and hands it to her. It's the purple pen that fell on the floor, the one that looks suspiciously like the one she lost at the beginning of the year.

"I accidentally stole your pen in the first week of school," Abed says bluntly. "I've been sitting behind you all year hoping I would get the perfect chance to sneak it back into your backpack."

Annie nods, as if this is a logical thing for a person to do. "You never got the perfect chance?"

"I'm not sure. When I noticed your crush on Troy and the beginning of your descent into pill addiction, I kind of forgot about the pen thing. It was fascinating human drama," Abed explains. "Please don't think I'm a stalker. I just like TV. Your life looked like it was going to be similar to TV."

She probably shouldn't, but Annie believes him. That doesn't mean she's not upset and a little freaked out. "How did you know that stuff about me? Not that it's true- okay, it's true. But you shouldn't know that! And how is my life similar to TV?!"

They're outside the office now. Abed looks down at her with a combination of compassion and interest. "I can just tell these things. When you grow up as an outsider trying to fit it, you have to learn how the insiders act so you can be like them."

Annie smiles a little. She knows that feeling, but she doesn't think it's true for Abed. "It doesn't look like you're trying to fit in."

Abed nods. "That's true. I stopped a long time ago, possibly before I really started. Mostly I just learned how to interpret how people act from TV, and your crush on Troy fits right into the pattern that TV Tropes calls Give Geeks A Chance."

Well. Now he's a less fun weird. "I'll have to look that up."

"You should. TV Tropes is a really fun website," Abed says. "I should probably go talk to the principal now."

"Yeah, probably," Annie says, a little sorry to see him go. She turns and starts to walk back to class.

"Oh, and Annie?"

She turns back. "Yes, Abed?"

"The Give Geeks A Chance trope is pretty much only for male geeks. There's a double standard that means that every time it's a geeky or nerdy girl who likes a hot guy, she'll end up being Beautiful All Along."

At that, Abed shuts the door to the office, leaving a shocked Annie in the hallway, thinking she should probably go on TV Tropes when she gets home.


End file.
